....in thinking the cost of weddings is becoming beyond todays young people

[concernedrose]

DS is planning on getting married next year. He and fiance both have good jobs but are paying off student loans, and pay £850 a month in rent for a tiny one bedroomed flat. They also are trying to save for a mortgage. So imagine their (and our) horror at the price of weddings. It seems that to be able to do everything for under £10,000 is virtually impossible in the area we live in. And they have accepted they wont be able to have a honeymoon immediatly after the wedding. This seems a vast sum of money to me, but even calling in favours from friends and relatives, (ie cake making, invitation making, flower arranging) it looks like this is what it is going to cost. Oh well, anyone for beans on toast!!!

Also my sister never had a photographer, my uncle did it, everyone else took photos, and she had disposables on the tables during the reception.

I know loads and loads of people who have done their weddings on small budgets, some as low as £1,000 - including rings, outfits, registrar, dinner, well everything really! It was brilliant.

I remember lots of magazines have inspiration in them for smaller weddings when I was planning my own.

Here are some of the costs / ideas

*local registry office (£200-£250)
*second hand / vintage wedding dress / high street dress (£35 - £200) OR find someone to make the wedding dress - my friend's cousins made hers as her wedding gift and another friend found a dress maker to make a stunning dress for £400
*get someone whose good at photography to do the photographs or just have a professional to do an hour of shots of the bride and groom.
*bridesmaids buy their own dresses and shoes. BHS and high street shops do loads of bridesmaid type dresses.
*have a make-up lesson for free at benefit and buy the make-up to do on your own or get a good friend to do it.
*don't bother with a band. Get all guests to send in a song with their RSVP that they would like to hear and put a play list together on spotify. If you are in a pub they will have a sound system. I think you can still sign up to have access for a day without the adverts for about £1?
*don't bother with paper invitations, do an email and get someone to put together a simple website with all of the details for the day.
*suit hire or high street for the groom - Zara do some nice suits for under £200.
*for the reception find a pub / restaurant / village hall / own house and garden or friend / relatives house? Sit down or buffet by outside caterers or get everyone to bring a dish to make a big picnic OR something really simple from a local deli / bakers. One of our friends had a late ceremony in Cornwall and got a load of local pasties and their families did salads and desserts, which went down really well. Or another was a teacher and had the school dinner ladies to do gourmet sausages from a local farm shop in Brighton with mash and peas and fancy gravies. Another just did a sit down in a nice restaurant for 20 adults and 10 kids. Provide all of the booze yourself - kegs of ale, tesco wine by the case for wine deals if you can - we did this for my wedding and saved a bomb on wine and champagne.
*small posy bouquet for the bride bought the day before - £25 and single rose button hole for the groom - £5 OR friends to do flowers?
*don't ask for presents but ask for everyone to contribute something to the wedding or money toward the house.
*a honeymoon could be a weekend at a nice spa hotel or a cosy cottage in the country.

I know people usually want the big white hotel wedding but hotels / venues do charge so much money because they can. There are so many cheaper, quirkier and more individual ways of getting married for a small budget. Some of the best weddings I've been to haven't been the big fancy ones but the small ones with loads of family and friends helping and personal touches. And it's all about being in love and tying the knot not fancy chair covers and designer dresses :)

HTH xx

Good luck!

thank you all, lots of good ideas which i will pursue. So exactly who are all these people who spend 18 grand?, which is what we are told the average is, not one person who has responded on this thread has spent anything like this aqmount.
Incidently, my wedding 28 years ago was on the mega cheap, as we had just finished phd/medical studies, so were broke. fab wedding at registry office, followed by country pub buffet. People still talk about it, especially the funny bits, like we drove ourselves in out battered yellow beetle wearing huge orange cagoules as it was tipping down with rain, how the best mans car broke down en route and had to be rescued by us, and a quite a few other things which made the day so memorable, and also relaxing, so i knew in theory it may still be possible to do a cheaper DIY wedding. I feel long hours on the laptop researching

We had no chair covers ... and we sent everyone home with a bit of wedding cake instead of bloody almonds !

The idea of a big a long wedding day is my idea of hell, my perfect wedding would be in the summer, nice open space, a buffet, a barbeque, a cd player with a cheesy disco ball, places to get comfy and for everyone to eat drink and make prats of themselves.

Dps American cousins keep coming over to Scotland to be married. It costs an absolute fortune (although they can afford it) but I always end up sitting at a table, picking through yet another microwave hotel chicken dinner, watching the bride and groom sitting there having financed a party for a load of relatives they barely know, and think why?

Why not have a wedding in the states with all your friends instead of thousands of miles away in a dreary Scottish castle, which looks amazing in the photos, but to which you can only invite a couple of pals and your mum and dad and assorted distant relatives.

Oh and for wedding photos, a friend bought loads of disposable cameras and put them on tables to encourage folk to take photos and the collected them in after the reception and had them developed. It was really nice record of their day from multiple perspectives.

My milmade the b maid dresses. Mydresswas in the sale.
Local floristdid flowers and we providedbuttonholes for the guests asfavours.
Cars were bogof offer andcakd was made by friend of mil.
We did a large church wedding for 120 at a 4 star hotel for under £6k

OP, save your breath.

Your son and his girlfriend don't want a wedding on the cheap. They want a posh dream wedding with all the trimmings and don't want to compromise. For every suggestion you come up with, they will have an excuse as to why that wouldn't work.

I think they are sending some really big hints your way in the hope that you will offer to cover some of the cost.

Spending hours researching budget ideas on the internet would be a complete waste of your time. That's not what they want you to do. They've gone over budget with their ideas and I'm sure that if they cut back they could save thousands, but they aren't prepared to do that.

And those figures are largely quoted by people within the wedding industry to put pressure on young couples that this is the amount they are expected to spend because everybody spends that much. It isn't true. Where are these stats from? Has anyone been asked for a survey how much they spent on their wedding? Or do they just ring round hotels and ask how much they charge for an average wedding and use that?

Ooh another good tip is to approach your local Uni. Lots of students need practical experience so you can find trainee chefs who are willing to help out with the catering; trainee cake decorators; trainee hairdresses and even trainee dressmakers.

We hired the University canteen for our meal and the staff couldn't have been more chuffed!

Its depends on which part is important to the couple, the actual getting married part or the extra for show bits. Getting married in a hotel is optional as is most of the other faff, its not a necessity, if you want them, fine, but the couple need to accept that thats what they cost, you cant really moan about it. Loads of suggestions have been given on how you can make it cheaper. A wedding breakfast for 30? I'd be cutting that out straight away.

Me and DH always wanted to go off abroad to get married and spent several years researching prices, but because we have similar outgoings to your son we finally accepted that it was never going to be so at the beginning of this year we booked the registry office in the next town and fucked off and got married without telling anyone but the two witnesses. The whole thing came to less than £300, which was within out bidget and means we are not in debt over it. We've been together 13 years now and wish we pissed off ten years ago to do it.

A lot of all the extras at weddings are for other people's benefit and not the actual bride and grooms, I've been to several big weddings over the last few years and at all of them the bride and groom looked so stressed that I doubt they actually enjoyed the day.

YANBU. I did wonder at your 1st post if you are in Surrey!
I know someone planning a wedding depending on selling her house. If they house doesn't sell, she isn't getting married this year.

I went to a lovely wedding a couple of years ago - marquee in a field with a vintage/home made theme. It was lovely but hard work to plan if you work full time!

i had a bit of a plush wedding, which was more to keep up with the joneses than anything else... We prioritised all wrong.. i.e.: venue, food, rings,dress, extra silly bits. Also had far too many guests.If I could do it again.. I would cut the number of guests to those dearest, and prioritised: rings (as they are forever), honeymoon, dress, food, venue. And all the frilly extras were just a pain in the arse to organise, guests may have oohed and aahed for about a minute and than that's it.. what a waste of time, money and energy!

Totally agree with TheRhubarb that it sounds as if the hope is the bank of mum and dad will cover.

So please don't spend hours on the internet, just say firmly that weddings can be done for much cheaper. If they are old enough to get married, they are old enough to research and budget their wedding.

It's costs bog all to get married. The wedding is one day. It's what comes after that matters.

I got married 4 years ago, my wedding cost under 5k! My cousin got married 3 years ago, her wedding cost even less than mine. my sister is getting married later this year and her budget is 5k. You do not need to spend loads on a wedding! If our wedding had cost a penny more than 5k we wouldn't have been able to get hitched.

My venue alone cost more than 10k.

But we waited and saved til we could afford it. If you are spending the rest of our lives together, an extra year to wait for the wedding you want with all the people you want there, all decently looked after is nothing. Fretting about costs and cutting corners due to affordability would stress me out much more.

Depending on where in Surrey you are, and if not committed to the existing venue yet, might consider here www.cowdray.co.uk/the-estate/capron-house-midhurst-town-centre-venue-to-hire/ which is where DH and I got married 5 yrs ago.

At the time it was extremely reasonable - £500 venue hire and then £45pp which included carved hot buffet with unlimited drinks, drinks reception (drinks unlimited again) with really nice canapes, table and chair hire, plus flowers. They were run at the time as part of Midhurst Grammar school and now run by the Cowdray Estate, so things may have changed, but worth a look. Our wedding was under £8k for 90 (all of whom came to the whole thing) and the organisers at this venue are the nicest people ever.

Yabu as it can easily be done for far less. A friend had a wedding in a very posh part of London for 4000 (and half of that was on the band!) all in. You can hire a churchhall or other hall and get a caterer in yourself and buy wine yourself. Much cheaper that way!

YABU as it can totally be done for less - it depends where you look! DP and I are getting married in August - peak season! - for just under £5000 including a weeks honeymoon in south France. That's 80 guests, fed with a hot buffet, and evening reception. Look around and be inventive!

So you can serve alchohol (on a given-to-guests basis, not running a pay bar) in a non-licensed venue like a church hall?

If so, it must surely be nicer and perhaps even cheaper to get a good deal on nice booze and give it away in a venue like that, than to go to a hotel and pay their prices for some booze and have to have a pay bar as well?

Cost me £110 to get married, then we accidentally made a profit on the wedding itself, because our only cost was food and we got more in cash present (despite asking for no gifts). I even sold my wedding dress for £250, which was a £60 profit :-)

I would prefer a tarted up village hall (pinterest will be full of decor ideas) with the food and booze brought in and everyone partying till dawn over a boring hotel reception any day of the week.

I'm surprised more people don't elope. The idea of planning a wedding makes me want to have a stiff drink followed by a lie down.

I did.

You can stick your favours and family fights and go have your fairytale wedding for well under £10k here. here.

I am so glad we did, despite the MIL still muttering years after about how we aren't properly married as she wasn't there and as we didn't have a party and we should still have one. The words 'over', 'body', 'my' and 'dead' spring to mind.

Village hall wedding inspiration on Pinterest

pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=village+hall+wedding